“WHOEVER BETRAYS THE country will pay the price, I assure you,” Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame told a rally soon after the country’s former intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, was found strangled in a South African hotel room last January.
Karegeya had quit the government and become a leading opponent of the regime, which President Kagame would certainly see as a betrayal of the country.
It’s not unusual for dictators to see their own interests and those of the country they rule as one and the same thing. It’s not even uncommon for dictators to have people killed.
What’s really rare is a dictator who has had quite a lot of people killed, but is congratulated by other countries for his excellent administration and showered with foreign aid.
That is the happy lot of President Paul Kagame.
Fewer than half of Rwanda’s 12 million people have personal memories of the terrible genocide 20 years ago, but the country as a whole is still haunted by it.
Kagame has ruled Rwanda for all of that time, and he is convinced that only he can stop it from happening again. It’s only a small step from there to believing that he has the duty to maintain his rule by any means necessary, including even murder.
All the murders are officially denied, but nobody believes it. Last week, four not very competent assassins, one Rwandan and three Tanzanians, were found guilty by a South African court of trying to kill the former Rwandan army chief of staff, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, in Johannesburg in 2010.
They shot him in the stomach, but he survived after months in intensive care—and they didn’t get away. FULL STORY